


she waits in an endless desert

by jinlinli



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Childhood, Comfort Food, Flowers, Gen, Pre-Star Wars: The Force Awakens, she pretty much latches onto anyone resembling a parental figure
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-14
Updated: 2016-02-14
Packaged: 2018-05-20 09:21:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6000652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jinlinli/pseuds/jinlinli
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her first memory is of dust.</p>
<p>A look into Rey's time on Jakku.</p>
            </blockquote>





	she waits in an endless desert

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: A scavenger drugs Rey and keeps her under his control for a period of time during which he forces her to injure herself. Another scavenger is attacked and torn to pieces. She kills an injured pilot to prevent a protracted death.

Her first memory is of dust.

She collapses and lies with her nose pressed into the ground. Dust fills her throat and lungs with each breath, and she doesn't even have the strength to cough. She knows that she is dying. She knows with wisdom not her own. She knows that she is a child in a strange hostile world, and she will not survive.

A figure appears above her and turns her over. She shudders when she sees the large terrible mouth and the skin stretched taut over its bones. Its eyes are large and hollow and sunken deep into its face. The iron chains wrapped around its neck jangle when it moves. It reaches down and touches her face, digging the long sharp claws of its fingers into her flesh. If she could have, she would have screamed then, but she can do nothing as the creature pierces her skin. Death has come for her.

But then, she feels her strength return. Moisture dampens her parched throat. Her breathing grows steadier. She even has the energy to retch out the dirt and grit collected in her stomach. When she is able to sit up, the creature withdraws its fingers, drawing its claws back into itself. It gently touches her hair with its hand and croons the long slurred syllables of its language.

She falls asleep with the strange certainty that the creature will watch over her.

 

The next day the creature carries her on its back, her fingers curled around the chains collaring its neck. Every day, the creature passes its water through its claws to her body so she will survive. Although they cannot understand a word the other says, the time goes peacefully. Sometimes she attempts to imitate the creature’s language, but her mouth and tongue are not made to form the right syllables.

It walks with a steady shambling gait, but it never seems to tire. The heat does not seem to bother it. It does not ever grow hungry or thirsty. She begins to think that it can continue walking forever. And although she cannot remember anything but the desert, she knows she is not of the desert. Not like this creature.

She knows because her skin is pale and thin and easily split open in the heat. The wind digs furrows into her flesh, crying for water. Her body is weak and small. The water drains out of her far too quickly. She sweats, she pisses, she bleeds, she cries. She is a creature built for softer, cooler, damper worlds.

Sometimes she looks back and sees silhouettes in the distance. Even when she cannot see them, she can hear their chattering rise above the sighing sand. Although the distant pursuers do not seem to bother the creature, they frighten her.

 

Just as she is beginning to convince herself that they really will keep going forever, the creature lumbers into a small settlement. The bustle of activity stills at the sight of them. She shrinks away from the strangers’ gazes. A slight man with a twisted spine and long spindly fingers breaks away from the crowd. He stares openly at the creature but speaks to her.

“What are you doing with an Uthuthma, human child?”

“It found me.”

“Uthuthma only care about their kind, their water, and their paths. Why would it change its course?”

“I was dying.”

“Uthuthma don’t think. They don’t save lives.”

“This one did.”

“Get out of here.” The man says to Uthuthma. “Go on.”

“It’s not doing any harm.”

“Desperate people follow Uthuthma because Uthuthma know where to find water. If this one stays, we’ll be overrun by scum.”

“Then we’ll leave.”

“The Uthuthma goes, but you, human child, stay here.”

“Why?”

“You will die out there. You will live here.”

“I’m not leaving Uthuthma.”

The man clicks his teeth together and stares hard at Uthuthma. “You’re just going to bring the human child here, and then take her back to the sand? She is young and soft, and I know some of your parasites have a taste for human flesh.”

Uthuthma looks at the man for a long time. Eventually it carefully puts her on the ground and pats her head. It croons at her once more before turning and walking back into the desert.

The man stands next to her as they watch it disappear. “Oh, stop your crying, human child. Uthuthma cannot protect you, but I will make sure you stay alive.”

 

The man’s name is Ivano Troade.

Uthuthma had been kind. Ivano Troade is sharper and colder, but he is kind in his own ways. He does not like answering questions or comforting children, but he protects his own. The settlement is full of people who delve into the bellies of giant metal corpses for scraps. “Scavengers,” Ivano Troade tells her. He negotiates with the Niima junk boss, fends off raiders with a wild ferocity, and shields their settlement from unfriendly eyes, all for the sake of his scavengers.

As he cleans and inspects the bits of machinery brought in every day, he would name the part he is working with. “This is an electrophoto receptor. This is a power converter. This is a flashback suppressor. Are you listening, human child? You will need to remember this in the future.”

After a month, Ivano Troade hands her off to a woman with four small round eyes, smooth three-fingered hands, and tusks covering her mouth. Her Basic is more clumsy and stilted than the carefully enunciated words of Ivano Troade, and she occasionally slips into a strange bleating language. But she is kinder.

She calls herself Mashra, and she answers every question. Scavengers are scrappy and desperate people. Some of them are kind. Some of them are not. One survives by defending against both.

The hulking metal beasts in the desert are not creatures at all but rather enormous machines built by organic and mechanical hands. They had flown above the atmosphere and attacked each other until they fell and crashed into the ground. They now sleep in a place called the Graveyard of Giants.

Ivano Troade sent Uthuthma away to protect his settlement. Ivano Troade is kind. Uthuthma is of a species that had lived on Jakku before the other species came and chased them away from the water sources. Uthuthma can live for years without water, and they can share it with other beings with their claws. She knows this already.

But more important than anything else was after Mashra introduces herself, she asks, “Your name?”

Ivano Troade did not think to ask for a name. Uthuthma could not have even if it wanted to. She had a name once, but she has long since lost it. She shakes her head.

“Pick one. Will need one. Too many humans to tell apart.”

She thinks of Uthuthma, who was kinder than Ivano Troade and not as kind as Mashra, but its presence had been more comforting to her. At one point, she got close to recreating the sounds of its language. She had been rolling the syllables on her lips and tongue when Uthuthma looked at her and responded. She repeated the same sound over and over, and Uthuthma carded its hand through her hair, humming contentedly.

“Rey,” she tells Mashra. “I’ll call myself Rey.”

 

There had been a time before the desert. Rey had lived in a place where the wind wasn’t so desperate for water that it dug furrows into her skin, dust didn’t crust around her eyes, and the sun didn’t bleach the sky bone-white.

Nothing lives on Jakku.

They simply survive until the heat, the raiders, the storms, or the animals inevitably kill them. Any greenery is heat-blasted, trampled, or up-rooted. Not even Uthuthma, a species that has been on this planet for millennia, can ever truly flourish.

The time before the desert has left the barest of residuals inside her, and she clings to what’s left desperately. A memory of hands holding her down as a ship broke through the atmosphere. A doll, long since snatched away.

Rey lost the name her family had given her, but she will not allow herself to lose another one. She repeats the name to herself as often as she can. Rey, _Rey_ ¸ **Rey** , Rey. The name has been worn smooth by constant use. It sits old and dull in her mind, but she continues worrying at it. She is afraid that one day she will turn around and find that this name has also disappeared. _Rey._

Rey lied. She cannot remember the day her family left. The memory is a dream. She has other dreams. Dreams of snow. Dreams of invisible hands on her throat and invisible hands sifting through her mind. Dreams of slate oceans and green islands with thousands of stairs piling over each other. She often adds details to the dreams she likes: a kind but regretful smile from a hazy-faced woman, a promise that they will return for her one day, a tiny figure of a man perched on the top of a precipice.

But Rey knows that she has a family. The junk boss at Niima knew her family. He had been there when they left. He tells Rey that if she leaves Ivano Troade to work for him directly, he will tell her about her family. She knows that he covets her skills.

Rey is better suited to scavenging than most. Her small slight body can fit into tight spaces. She is flexible and has a knack for climbing. Occasionally as Rey wanders the wreckages, she feels an odd premonition guide her. “Intuition,” Ivano Troade had told her, “All scavengers pick it up eventually.” He taught her about every model of spacecraft that can conceivably end up on Jakku, and then, he explained every mechanical part and their function to her. Mashra had taken Rey into the picked-over husks of dead starships. “Look. Slow and close. Other scavengers rush and miss many things.”

Rey nodded as she carefully wiggled a capacitor out of its socket. She looked to Mashra for approval and received a short nod. Rey smiled.

Mashra gripped her arm, and Rey remembered the lesson she and Ivano Troade had impressed upon her. It is easy to distrust people who are not kind. While their motives might not always be clear, their intentions are easy to parse out. Rey can easily deal with them with a deftly placed blow from her quarter staff.

But people who are kind are harder. Even when she knows kindness is used as a tool to manipulate, to control, to make her vulnerable, she yearns for it. People who are kind do not hurt her, but they use her nonetheless. Ivano Troade and Mashra were kind, but they were kind because they needed her scavenging for them.

Rey accepts the junk boss’s deal. Ivano Troade and Mashra are kind, but Rey has learned her lessons well. Even then, she aches when she says her goodbyes.

Maybe she is foolishly clinging to a dream, but she knows that she can trust her family. They are the only people in the galaxy whom she can trust because she knows they will be kind without ulterior motive.

Nothing lives on Jakku, and Rey is no different. She can find a ship and fly faraway, but she won’t. She knows that if her family ever comes back, they will look for her at the Niima Outpost. It is the only settlement on Jakku with a navigational beacon.

As promised, the junk boss tells Rey about her family. She has a mother who is taller than her father. They both have dark brown hair. They had not stayed long on Jakku, and their ship had been a small model, optimized for speed instead of comfort. Rey’s mother had kissed her on the forehead before she left.

Rey knows that the junk boss probably had not ever met her family, but she appreciates the lie nonetheless. In these instances, even he is kind.

 

Rey sleeps under the huddling tarps at Niima Outpost until one day she wakes with her eyes covered and her limbs bound. She has long learned to defend herself, and she always sleeps lightly, but she can do nothing against drug-induced unconsciousness.

She learns that she has been captured by a Melitto, but she does not ever learn his name. She knows him only by the two grooves carved into the chitin plates covering his face. His voice is muffled and distant when he says, “You will scavenge for me now.”

There are four others captured with her. When they aren’t scavenging, he keeps them drugged. She spends her nights drifting in a blurry haze, dimly aware of a sense of unease in the back of her mind. During the day, the Melitto doses her with enough to keep her sluggish and pliant, but not enough to make her clumsy.

Eventually she learns the names of the others, but most of the time, the knowledge is tamped down by the sedatives. The blankness keeps most things suppressed. She cannot remember place names or what things are called or even her own name. The only name that sticks is the species of her captor, and she always keeps the knowledge tightly clenched in her fists, even when she cannot remember why she needs to.

The Melitto’s command booms dully against her temples: scavenge and return, scavenge and return, scavenge and return. Fetch. Like a dog. Interspersed through the months of blankness are a few precious minutes of self-awareness.

A man stands at a distance, watching her. She ignores him as she unscrews the Y-wing’s laser tips. Fetch. The man introduces himself, but his name slips out of her mind the moment she hears it. She says nothing, doesn’t even acknowledge his presence. Fetch.

He talks to her and touches her head. She doesn’t flinch or back away or attack him. The Melitto hadn’t ever commanded her to protect herself, so she looks at him and does nothing. The man is frowning, and he says something else to her. She slips back under the blankness and remembers no more.

Sometimes she wakes to find that she has lost weeks. There are new scars on her arms with no accompanying memory of how they got there.

She does not remember how long the Melitto keeps her in the blankness, but she remembers the moment the blankness disappears. She is paired with another scavenger that day. At that point, there is not enough sedative inside her to block out the knowledge that his name started with T, and the drugs affects him erratically. At times it makes his fingers awkward and slow, and at other times, it does nothing at all, and he writhes until the Melitto jabs a needle into his neck, and he becomes mute again.

They are sifting through the remains of a passenger freighter that had attempted to land after its navigation systems failed. The pilot had misjudged the severity of the winds, and the shuttle had crashed. When she and T pried open the door, they find the emaciated corpses of the passengers still strapped into their seats. Even through the drug haze, they are both disturbed by the faces caught in various expressions of agony and fear.

T stares at one woman in particular. He reaches out and touches her large fleshy mouth and the tendrils of skin hanging around her face. He stares at her face hard with a perplexed expression as if he is grasping at a memory. T begins to groan softly, clawing at his skin, rocking his head back and forth. She watches him. A vague urge to calm him down asserts itself over the blankness. She touches his shoulder. He flinches away from her and scrambles backward, knocking into the hatch of a storage unit.

The hatch opens. She catches a brief glimpse of flashing metal before T screams. Three birds tear into him with iron beaks and iron talons. She chokes on bile at the sight of split-open skin, exposed bone, and lurid red blood. T dies a gruesome but blessedly quick death.

After the birds are finished with stripping his body of flesh, they regard her for a long moment, clacking their bloody talons on the floor. She stands still with her nails digging into her palm, breathing hard through her nose. Eventually the birds turn back to their nest, and she flees the passenger freighter.

Scavenge and return. Fetch. The omnipresent command has been shunted aside in favor of the animal instinct to fight or fly. Even now, she knows she stands little chance against those birds, so she runs. She runs until her legs give out, and she collapses next to another spacecraft.

She is somewhere deep in the Graveyard of Giants. She looks up. She is leaning on the hull of an X-wing starfighter. It is a model that only Rebellion pilots use. She can remember the names of others now: Uthuthma and Mashra and Ivano Troade and Unkar Plutt. Teng Malar. T’s name had been Teng Malar. The birds are steelpeckers. She lives at the Niima Outpost. The planet is called Jakku. Nothing lives on Jakku.

She realized the adrenaline had flushed the sedatives out of her system.

Slowly knowledge and memories trickle back into place. Some things are jumbled up but most clicked immediately, and she wonders how she had forgotten anything in the first place. But her own name remain stubbornly out of reach.

She remembers where the scars on her arms came from.

She had been crawling through a wreckage close to a village called Tuanul. The Melitto didn’t like letting his scavengers near settlements, but he had heard news of a recent storm uncovering a squadron of intact Y-wings. As she loaded the navcomputer and laster tips on her speeder, a man walked up to her with a curious expression on his face.

Now his name comes easily: Lor San Tekka. He stared at her, waiting for her to introduce herself in return, but her name was trapped under the blankness. She does not even have it now. A queasy expression appeared on his face, and she now knows what he had seen: slightly delayed reactions, light slow breathing, and dilated pupils. He said, “My god, what have they done to you?” and then, “Don’t go.” And the Melitto had never commanded her to ignore the orders of others, so she obeyed.

The man flinched away from her like he had been burned. He chose his words carefully after that. He sat on his haunches and told her that she had probably been drugged with a sedative made from the same lichen as Knockback Nectar. He talked about a woman in the village who had felt a ripple and sent him to investigate.

He laughed bitterly. “It’s almost cruel. After everything goes to hell, the universe decides to drop a child overflowing with raw talent right in my lap, and I can do nothing about it. What could I possibly do? Start another doomed Jedi academy? Bring back Luke, bring Ben home, bring those poor children back to life, and somehow that will make everything right?” He sighed morosely. “If only we had found you five years ago.”

At sunset, the call returned loud and vicious. Scavenge and return. She stood and started walking east. The man didn’t attempt to stop her this time. “I’m sorry. I won’t order you around if I know you’ll have no choice but to obey. My god, when was the last time anyone even treated you like a person?”

The Melitto had been furious when she returned. He ordered her to gouge deep cuts into her arms with her fingernails. She obeyed. For six terrible hours, she obeyed.

She pushes the memory away, tries to ignore the sickening roil inside her stomach at the thought. She casts about for something to focus on. The X-wing. It is a T-65B, an older model still favored by some Resistance pilots, but most have moved on to the sleeker T-70s and T-85s. It has a yellow emblem painted on its wings. She recognizes it as the chosen symbol of the Tierfon Yellow Aces, a well-known squadron of the old Rebellion. Somehow her mind can easily supply that information but cannot retrieve her own name.

She opens the cockpit door, and much to her relief, she does not find the corpse of the pilot. It seems that the pilot had survived the crash and abandoned their helmet and bulky flight gear because of the heat.

She settles in the pilot’s seat. Her legs can’t even reach the floor, and the control panel blocks most of her view. She wishes that the X-wing could work well enough fly. She would fly as far as she could, out of the Western Reaches, out of the Inner Rim, out of this very galaxy.

But she has nowhere to go.

At least she knows how things work here. If she left, she would be lost in a strange galaxy. At least if she stays here, there is the possibility that someone might return to find her. She hopes they would come soon. Nothing lives on Jakku. She cries then, feeling ever so small and young and alone in the endless desert.

She picks up the helmet and reads the name printed neatly on the side: Captain Dosmit Ræh.

The name snaps a connection in her brain, and she remembers now. Rey. Her name is Rey. She cries again, this time with relief. She doesn’t care that she is wasting water, and no one is around to see her and prey on her weakness. She hugs the helmet close to her chest and thanks the captain whose name was so similar to her own.

Rey clambers back out of the X-wing and walks out of the Graveyard of Giants, taking Captain Ræh’s helmet with her.

 

Rey stops at the remains of an AT-AT in Goazon Badlands. It is half-sunken into the sand with nothing but barren wasteland and scrap metal for miles in every direction. But she stops when she sees that it has a name, chipped and barely legible: Hellhound Two. Even with Captain Ræh’s helmet to keep her company, Rey feels a familiar pang of loneliness when she thinks of the Hellhound’s crew dying all by themselves in the middle of an alien desert. Nothing lives on Jakku.

She crawls through the access hatch in its belly. The interior is cooler, and Rey remembers Ivano Troade mentioned that AT-ATs are made of a metal alloy that resisted drastic changes in temperature. It would protect her from the freezing cold of night and hide her from the gnaw-jaws who hunted warm bodies at night. Rey decides to stay here for a while. She makes her way up to the head of the Hellhound and settles in the space behind the pilot chairs.

She is far enough away from Niima that the Melitto is unlikely to find her. She is safer here, but the Hellhound muffles all sound. The quiet bothers her. When she had slept at the Niima Outpost or Ivano Troade’s settlement, there was always noise. People shuffled and sighed in their sleep. The militia’s night shift murmured to each other. Tent fabric snapped in the wind. In the distance, prowling night creatures howled as they chased down their prey. Even when she spent nights in the enormous starships, the wind moaning through cavernous spaces and the sounds of old metal slowly sinking into sand kept her company.

As she lies curled on her side, she sees a hint of color underneath the control panel. It is a green spinebarrel flower growing from a little patch of sand. It is stunted and ugly and a little twisted, but alive. Rey falls asleep filled with wonder at the thought that something as fragile as a flower can live on Jakku.

 

Rey decides to make her home at Hellhound Two. The Melitto still looks for her at Niima. She fills the empty interior with odds and ends that she finds. She carefully potted the spinebarrel flower in a vase she had cobbled together from metal parts, and she now takes to collecting any flowers she can find.

She hadn’t realized how many blooming things live on Jakku until she started looking for them. Some are native, and some were brought over from other desert planets. She finds spinebarrels, pocky grubs, and funnel flowers. Molo shrubs and cacta bushes seldom flower, and nightblossoms only bloom at night. After a while, there are plants sprouting from every surface in Hellhound Two. Her own private forest.

Occasionally Rey thinks about her family in an abstract sort of sense. She scratches small lines into the metal wall to remind herself that she is here to stay. At least until her family comes back for her. She forces herself not to embellish on the vague details Unkar Plutt had fed her. She does not want to build her expectations on a lie that is only meant to keep her complacent.

So when she sits alone inside Hellhound, when Unkar Plutt cheats her out of the proper amount of portions, when she catches a glimpse of a Melitto browsing scraps at Niima Outpost, she thinks of Captain Ræh. Captain Ræh is a Rebellion pilot. She is tall and strong and beautiful with long braided hair falling loose when she takes off her helmet. She is a crack shot with a blaster, and she is brave when Rey is not.

When Rey wanders around the Goazon Badlands by herself, Captain Ræh walks beside her and tells her stories about her adventures with the Rebellion. Sometimes they come across a downed Y-wing or a Rebel blockade runner, and Rey imagines that Captain Ræh would find the pilots collapsed several meters away. They always help the pilots find a ship to take them back to the Resistance.

One day, Rey finds an orange flight suit in a storage container and brings it home with her. When she puts it on, it sags. The sleeves flop over her hands, and the pants bunch around her boots. She feels ridiculous, but Captain Ræh assures her that she looks just like a proper pilot. Rey believes her because Captain Ræh is kind, and inside the safety of her own mind, Rey never has to worry about the intentions behind her kindness.

She puts on the helmet. The dirt crusted over the visor turns everything a strange sepia-tone. She imagines herself in the cockpit of an X-wing, looping around the turret fire of an Imperial starship or outmaneuvering TIE fighters.

Rey has never flown an X-wing before. It is faster and sleeker than anything she has ever piloted. She has flown light freighters, cruisers, interceptors, shuttlecrafts, and even a Dunelizard on an errand that a Hutt operating in Cratertown had commissioned through Unkar Plutt. Once she briefly got her hands on a Z-95 Headhunter that a Resistance defector had been trying to trade for a ship that was faster and not so readily associated with his old faction.

Eventually Rey takes off the flight suit and cuts off strips of fabric so it will fit better. She uses the leftover scraps to fashion together a doll for Captain Ræh. It is a childish indulgence, but it makes her feel better anyway.

 

Sometimes she wakes up with _scavenge and return_ pounding inside her head. She forces the command out of her head and repeats her name to herself. Rey, Rey, Rey, Rey.

At least she still has her name. The Melitto had not stolen that from her no matter how hard he tried. She wonders if Captain Ræh in all of her wanderings through space had ever forgotten who she was. She doubts it. Strong, daring, brave Captain Ræh would never lose herself, but Rey is made of brittler stuff.

She catches a glimpse of her reflection on the shiny hull of a starship, and she stops short. All she can do is stare at the angry red scars on her arms. Her skin is ridged and ugly. Even after she has escaped the Melitto, he still left a mark on her. A brand that she had willingly carved into her own skin.

She goes back to the Hellhound quickly and snatches up two long strips of cloth. She wraps them tightly around her arms, covering her pitted skin. She pulls Captain Ræh’s helmet against her chest and wishes that she could be so strong she is untouchable.

What terrifies her the most is that one day she will wake to find that the call had tugged her from her bed out of Hellhound Two and taken her all the way back to the Melitto’s feet. And she will heel like a dog. Fetch. Like a dog.

 

A TIE fighter streaks into view and crashes less than a mile away, so close Rey can feel the impact quiver through the ground.

She finds the pilot trapped inside the cockpit and drags him out of the wreckage. Her hands are blood-slicked when she unzips his flight suit to check for injuries. He looks up at her, wide and fearful, and she realizes that she is still wearing Captain Ræh’s helmet. Standard-issue for Rebellion X-wing pilots with an infamous squadron’s insignia emblazoned on the side. No wonder he shudders at the sight of her.

She snatches it off in a hurry, but she can still see the whites of his eyes and the quick panicked motion of his chest. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m trying to help you,” Rey tries to tell him. She tries to staunch the bleeding with the fabric of his flight suit and her own clothes. She even unwinds the strips of cloth covering the scars on her arms.

Every scrap of fabric she has is blood-soaked and ruined by the time she accepts that there is nothing she can do for him. The pilot seems to have calmed down at least. He stares up at Rey not with fear but with confusion.

She remembers that Jakku is different from other worlds. Kindness is an investment. On a planet where nearly everything kills, there is no knowing when you might end up helpless and alone and at the mercy of the next person you meet. You scrape together what food you have left and give all you can to the starving stranger. Because next time, that stranger might be you.

Rey smooths down his sweaty hair and runs the pads of her palms lightly over his cheeks. Mashra did that for her once. The gesture had been thoughtless, an instinctive absent-minded expression of affection that she had likely learned from her own parents. Mashra had made sure that Rey remembered her lessons well. No one is kind for its own sake. People do not pick up and feed weak children because they are merciful or caring. They do it as a part of a planet-wide effort to save their own skins.

It surprises her how odd it must be from the pilot’s perspective. A young starving girl stripping the clothes off her own back to save a stranger. He does not know that Rey is simply fulfilling a self-preservation custom that has been ingrained into her very being since childhood. He must think she is well and truly kind.

Everything that the pilot does now seems to be slow. His breathing is labored, but thankfully steady. Even his blinking seems to take longer, and Rey thinks of Teng Malar who died horribly but too quickly to suffer. A couple days after she came back to herself, she returned to the passenger freighter to find him, but his bones had already been picked clean.

The pilot can do nothing now but wait and watch Death’s slow methodical approach. Rey remembers what it is like to suffer helplessly and with no end in sight. Scavenge and retrieve. Fetch.

She cradles his head and kisses his forehead. His eyes are closed, and he stutters something: “Ama.” She recognizes the language: Tangenise. But that is not important. His vertebrae crack in her hands, and a breath judders out of his mouth before he stills.

Rey gently rubs fine dust on his skin, working from his face down to the soles of his feet. The dust soaks up his sweat and his blood. After she scrapes it off, his skin is clean.

She buries him naked in a shallow grave. The nightwatcher worms have risen from their burrows, and they silently watch with half-lidded red eyes. Jakku funerals are simple and efficient affairs. Death is too common for them to be anything but. She keeps his helmet, his blaster, and his comlink, but his flight suit is beyond salvaging. Her clothes are in a similar state.

She leaves him with the nightwatcher worms standing guard and returns to the Hellhound before the predators track down the source of the blood scent. They will dig up the pilot’s body and eat it, but at least burial gives him some semblance of dignity in death.

Rey peels off her blood-stained clothing and cuts them into small pieces. She will use them as kindling for the stove later. The pilot’s helmet sits next to Captain Ræh’s helmet. First Order and Rebellion. New and old. Shiny black and scuffed white.

Rey carefully wraps strips of cloth around her arms, but that leaves her with only two gauzy swathes of fabric. She has spare trousers so she crosses the fabric over each other so they cover her chest and wraps a belt around her waist to hold everything in place. When she stands, the fabric flutters around her legs and brushes the backs of her calves.

She smiles at the tickling sensation. Tomorrow she will find a new shirt at Niima, but she will keep the new fluttering fabric.

 

A flock of bloggins had wandered into the Goazon Badlands. Rey can hear them from miles away. A flock this far west is a rare sight. They normally stick near Tuanul because the villagers feed them, and most other people chase them off. Their squawking and shuffling tends to attract predators.

When Rey hears their distinctive ruckus draw nearer, she holes up inside the head of Hellhound Two and watches two ripper raptors tear into the flock before fighting over the scraps. The larger raptor wins and eats its fill before moving on. The bloggins are nothing more than feather and bone when it is done, but most of the smaller raptor remains. Rey ventures out and quickly cuts off large hanks of meat from the raptor corpse before retreating, quietly celebrating the boon. If Rey had the luxury, she would have taken the time to butcher it properly, but other predators had caught on to the blood scent, and she can hear their baying.

Ripper raptor is tough and sinewy and completely inedible unless stewed for days on end. Rey isn’t picky. The last time she had any meat had been years ago, when she was still living at Ivano Troade’s settlement.

Sometimes they heard news of a gnaw-jaw caught out in the sun, and all the scavengers would gather together for the hunt. A gnaw-jaw at night spells certain death. There is no outrunning six swift legs and no outfighting six taloned feet and a razor-toothed maw. But a gnaw-jaw in daylight is a different story. The heat makes it slow and sluggish. It’s still dangerous, but a twelve-man hunting party can conceivably subdue it.

Everyone at the settlement did a little cooking here and there. Some of the scavengers roasted spinebarrel stems for a snack. Occasionally Mashra made twists of glutinous bread with smuggled sugar and baked them on sheet metal left out in the sun. The children liked watching the dough turn golden-brown, but it was Ivano Troade who cooked the gnaw-jaw meat. It was Ivano Troade who taught Rey to cook. He skinned the gnaw-jaw’s thick hide, removed its organs, and cuts the meat from its bones with confident precise flicks of his knife. Any cocky scavenger who thought to put one over on little stunted Ivano Troade quickly changed their mind when they saw him butcher an animal.

He had spent a decade on Tatooine and in that time, gained a taste for the cooking and desert living. He even cobbled together a hydroponic station to grow Tatooine vegetables when he came to Jakku.

For him, cooking meat was a week-long affair. He boiled the bones to make the broth and added shelled podpoppers, thin strips of tato, crisp puk leaves, thick-cut tubers, and cubes of meat wrapped in manak leaves. He roasted dried hubba gourds for acidity and boiled bright orange H’Kak beans for fragrance.

But the key was the bloddle. That vegetable made even the blandest foods taste better, and according to Ivano Troade, it was the only thing stopping the entire population of Tatooine from going insane. Because they might live on a backwater planet even more inhospitable than Jakku, but at least they had a native vegetable that made everything taste rich and savory.

Ever since she broke with Ivano Troade’s settlement, her meals have all been the starchy flavorless survival rations doled out by Unkar Plutt.

There are times when a passing smuggler shares his dried provisions with Rey. They are salty and leathery with a hint of sweetness. On hungry days, she eats the energy cubes she finds in the storage lockers of Imperial Starship ruins. Those leave her quivering and sweating and sleepless for days on end.

Rey ate fruit once. A person who called himself the knocking man had flown all the way out to the Western Reaches in search of his home planet. He told Rey that his home was called Alderaan, and it was the most beautiful planet in the entire galaxy. Someone had tried to destroy it, but a group of Jedi had used the Force to move it so no one could find it. He also claimed that he could knock his knuckles against someone’s forehead and push their illness right out of them.

Rey was skeptical because she knew that only the old Empire had been powerful enough to destroy planets, and at that time, there had only been one Jedi, and one Jedi wasn’t strong enough to move an entire planet halfway across the galaxy. But she asked him to demonstrate his power anyway. “Knock the hunger out of my stomach,” she said, and the knocking man laughed.

“Hunger isn’t a disease, child,” he said and pulled a round yellow object from his bag. He gave it to Rey and said, “This is a starblossom. It’s a fruit from my planet.” When Rey eyed him skeptically because some had attempted to poison her before, the knocking man said, “Eat, it’s good.” The fruit smelled fragrant and not dangerous at all, and Rey hadn’t eaten in days, so she bit into it.

She could have cried then. The fruit was soft and sweeter than anything she’d ever tasted. It was even sweeter than the smuggled-sugar pastries Mashra had baked. This was not a fruit that could grow on Jakku. The plants here were bitter and hardy, but the starblossom was gentle. Rey believed the knocking man when he said it came from the most beautiful planet in the galaxy because tender fruit could only grow in tender places. Even when she swallowed, it left a pleasant flavor on her tongue, something mildly sharp and citrusy.

The knocking man watched her eat with a smile on his face. Rey wanted to be wary of him, but the fruit had left a deep contentment inside her. “An Aqualish spacer stopped here to refuel a couple days ago. He’s been all over, and if you’re home planet’s anywhere in the Western Reaches, he would know. You’ll probably be able to find him at Ergel’s Bar.” The knocking man thanked her profusely and went on his way.

Rey saved the seeds from the starblossom and planted it in a pot at home, but Jakku dirt is too dry and sandy for them to grow. She couldn’t bring herself to throw the seeds out, so she kept them in a little container next to her spinebarrel flower.

Some months when the scavenging is thin or when Unkar Plutt is feeling stingy, Rey takes the seeds out of their container, rolls them between her fingers, and remembers the sweetness on her tongue. She lies curled amidst her flowers and wishes that her family or Uthuthma or Captain Ræh or even a stranger would find her and stroke her hair until the hunger passes. On those days she wavers in and out of consciousness, and she dreams of her ocean and her islands.

On the islands there would be water that never ran out, a sky grey with rainclouds, and thousands of different blooming flowers. Rey could spend hours sitting on the shale beaches, watching the waves throw white spray onto the rocks. There would be sweet fruit and stewed meat that she could eat until she burst.

Rey sits outside with Captain Ræh’s helmet on her head, watching the sinking sun burn red on the sand. She eats slowly, separating muscle from bone and tendon from muscle with her teeth. She doesn’t have any hydroponic vegetables, but she makes do with salt chipped from the thick sheets crusting the rim of Namenthe’s Crater. The meat is gamey and leaves an oddly sour aftertaste, but it is almost tender.

She hasn’t eaten this well in years.

 

Jakku wears everything down.

The fine tan sand is everywhere. Every rough and craggy surface is smoothed down by the wind whipping fistfuls of sand. It’s in their hair, in their skin, in their teeth. It tamps everything down to shades of brown and grey. It even makes their blood run sluggish and rusty instead of bright red.

The sun drains all the vibrancy from the people who walk under it. They talk with looks and small touches because their voices wilt in the heat. Words are reserved for important subjects: food, water, survival. All unrelated events pass without comment. There is no room for them, not sorrow or love or even a name. They all sit dusty in her mind, unspoken and occasionally forgotten.

Rey is always surprised by the travelers who find themselves at Niima. They are tired and desperate for unrecycled air, desperate enough to stop on a backwater desert planet. But there is a vibrancy to them. They aren’t counting the days down to their deaths. They arrive filled with purpose, smiling and wearing crisp flight suits. Rey always forgets until she catches a glimpse of lips pulled back over pink gums and clean fabric. She remembers how starved she is for color.

The boy does not have a worn-down name. He says “Finn” like it sits sharp and wonderful on his tongue. He asks her if she is okay, and the question startles her. Ivano Troade never cared beyond what he could mold her to be, and Mashra would have kept walking if she was ever too weak to follow. No one has cared so simply for her well-being since Uthuthma dropped her into Ivano Troade’s lap.

The boy does not comment on the over-brightness in her eyes when she offers her hand.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I might write a sequel later about Rey's time on D'Qar before she goes to find Luke.


End file.
